学位英语

第十一篇 When Our Eyes Serve Our Stomach【我们的视觉服务于我们的胃口】_2013新增文章

All we have a clock located inside our brains. Similar to your bedside alarm clock, your internal clock2 runs on a 24-hour cycle. This cycle, called a circadian rhythm, helps control when you wake, when you eat and when you sleep.

Somewhere around puberty, something happens in the timing of the biological clock. The clock pushes forward, so adolescents and teenagers are unable to fall asleep as early as they used to. When your mother tells you it's time for bed, your body may be pushing you to stay up3 for several hours more. And the light coming from your computer screen or TV could be pushing you to stay up even later.

This shift4 is natural for teenagers. But staying up very late and sleeping late can get your body's clock out of sync with the cycle of light and dark5. It can also make it hard to get out of bed in the morning and may bring other problems, too. Teenagers are put in a kind of a gray cloud6when they don't get enough sleep, says Mary Carskadon, a sleep researcher at Brown University in Providence, RI7. It affects their mood and their ability to think and learn.

But just like your alarm clock, your internal clock can be reset. In fact, it automatically resets itself every day. How? By using the light it gets through your eyes.

Scientists have known for a long time that the light of day and the dark of night play important roles in setting our internal clocks. For years, researchers thought that the signals that synchronize the body's clock8 were handled through the same pathways that we use to see.

But recent discoveries show that the human eye has two separate light-sensing systems. One system allows us to see. The second system tells our body whether it's day or night.

1. What does the new study mentioned in Paragraph l find?

A Hungry people see every word more clearly than ordinary people.

B Hungry people are always thinking of food-related words.

C Hungry people are more sensitive to food-related words than stomach-full people.

D Hungry people do not have lower-level of thinking process.

2. Why was there a delay on the day of the experiment?

A Because hungry people needed time to fill their stomach.

B Because Radel wanted to create two groups of testees, hungry and non-hungry.

C Because noon was not the right time for any experiment.

D Because Radel needed time to select participants in terms of body mass index.

3. What does the writer want to tell us?

A Human's senses aren't just delivering a strict view of what's going on in the world.

B What's perceived by our senses affects our way of thinking.

C Human brains can really be at the disposal of our motives and needs.

D Thinking processes guarantee the normal functions of our senses.

4. What did the results of the experiment indicate?

A 80 words flashed on the screen too fast for the participant to intentionally perceive.

B Hungry people were better at identifying neutral words.

C People who had just eaten were better at identifying food-related words.

D The participants could barely perceive what they needed or what they strived for.

5. What can we infer from the passage?

A 42 participants are too small a number for a serious investigation.

B An experiment with hungry and non-hungry participants is not reliable.

C Our thinking processes are independent of our senses.

D Humans can perceive what they need without involving high-level thinking processes.

翻译：我们的视觉服务于我们的胃口

我们的五官不仅仅让我们感知世界；还受大脑活动的影响。一项新研究发现：比起那些刚刚用过餐的人，饥饿的人能更清晰地看到与食品有关的词。

数十年以来，心理学家已经知道我们的心理活动直接影响到我们的视觉。例如，贫穷的孩子看到的硬币比实际的要大；饥饿的人看到的食物图片更明亮。法国的尼斯 ?索菲亚-安提波利斯大学试图调查这一现象：发生这种情况的时间是在大脑从眼睛接收到视觉信号的即时还是稍后些，这时高级思维活动已经介入了。

雷戴尔招募了健康指数正常的42位学生作为被试者。在测试的当天，每个学生被告知在中午到达实验室，这时距上一次的用餐时间有3—4个小时。等他们到达实 验室时，他们被告知实验时间有延迟。一半学生被告知十分钟后再回来；其余的给1个小时的时间先吃午饭。所以一半学生饿着肚子，另一半学生饱腹参加了此次实 验。

实验的步骤如下：要求被试者看电脑屏幕。屏幕上的80个字以1/300秒的频率闪动。由于字体非常之小，被试者只能凭感觉捕捉到字形。1/4的字是与食物 有关的。每闪动一个字，被试者回答字体的亮度并选择看到的是哪类词：一类是和食物有关的词，比如“蛋糕”；一类是中性词，比如“船”。由于每个词的闪动在 瞬间完成，被试者根本看不清楚那个词是什么。

饥饿的人看到与食物有关的词更明亮，且能更好地辨认出与食物有关的词。由于每个词的闪动太快，其实那些被试者根本不会确切地看到什么，这就说明：他们只是感觉不同，根本没经过思考。雷戴尔给出了这样的解释。

雷戴尔说：“这就是重点所在。人类可以真正感知到自身的需要或者为之奋斗的目标。该实验使我了解这样的事实，即我们的大脑是受我们的动机和需要所支配的。”

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（责任编辑：vstara）